When you aim to things you can not afford , its fantasy. Do you know the cost of cutting four gear from steel , align at a base and rotate them when you are feeding the film with many other gear train. Its hell of money

Indeed. The owner of a company I used to work for would tell his customers "you can have anything you like, whenever you want it as long as you can afford it".

I wouldn't expect a small scale home emulsion coater to buy the parts for a rotary die cutter. I would do it with a miniature version of a paper hole punch with pins to register the cut to the previous cut holes. This would be very easy to set up.

Steve.

"People who say things won't work are a dime a dozen. People who figure out how to make things work are worth a fortune" - Dave Rat.

I do agree that sheet film is a lot easier. And even at the width of 120 I have a bunch of 2.35x3.25 holders.

Plus i have a stash (No! It's not a hoard!) of glass window panes. So I too would probably try very little roll film.

When I think about the possibility of home manufacturer I invariably think small scale, dozens instead of thousands. The investment to make occasional new backing paper seems trivial compared to a perforating machine. Unless you can get or fabricate the perfing machine vey inexpensively.

For a small manufacturing operation, say 5K rolls of film, a usable perfing machine begins to make sense. And you could sell the film packed in a wrapper for the user to spool. Eschewing the cassettes.

I have some oddball FSU film in my freezer which is packed this way. It's just a strip of perforated 35mm film. The user had to load it in a cassette.

Some of the old Contax cameras had a refillable cassette.

MB

Last edited by michaelbsc; 11-10-2012 at 12:33 AM. Click to view previous post history.

This may be a far fetched question, but I am looking for a way to use my pretty much useless Kodak Colorburst 250 made in 1979. I am aware the film is unattainable and that Fujifilm had a similar film but is also unavailable due to scarcity. So, my question is there anyone out there who can possibly make film that can be used in my Kodak Colorburst 250?

you may be right about the return to the craftsperson-driven cottage industry. The problem is that means limited capacity and volume. This also means higher cost per unit and limitations as to what can be done. Will we have creafspeople turning out Kodak Gold 400 equivalents? I don't think so. Hand coated glass plate negatives? We already do

Mirko of Adox visited the New Ferrania and he mentioned that they are trying to convert the R&D department into what will be the production machine for their coming film production.
IIRC, if they have a nice pilot machine with a big yet small enough capacity, it could be quite feasible.

PE, as of knowledge and a bit OT. Of those 40 people that were fired from the film production at Kodak, you mentioned the simple wage economics... Younger workers with lower costs replacing the older ones. But were they into the core production of film?
I think not, as the cost of training a young engineer mut be all but small! Sadly the tech is slowly slipping away...

Kodak has 3 coating machines in R&D and one in production for pilot coatings. These could be used to make small quantities of films if they really wanted to slow down production. But, with little R&D the training of an engineer is pretty much rote and can be passed on. They are making the same things every day, not making something new.

But, if they shut down, it is truly lost and there are few out here in the world interested in learning.

We here every last bit of news about Kodak's film group shrinking, but news from Fujifilm is silent (aside from which films are lost). I wonder how small Fujfilm's coating facilities and staff have gotten. I guess we'll never really know.